Contemporânea

Jeff Wood: I had very little specific relationship to either place, other than as a general visitor to the Tagus region with my Portuguese family over the years. I was aware of the estuary and the bird situation here, and had visited casually a few times. And of course, the prospective airport story has been going on for years, so I believe it has been in the general awareness for quite some time, with all the tensions and contradictions it carries. One of the remarkable qualities of Portugal—partly due to its size, and the quality of geo-diversity within this small space—is that everything is very closely and palpably intertwined: culture, family life, geographic space, real estate… You feel all of these elements wherever you are, and you sense them all vibrating each other, very sensitive to disturbances and changes. Even the notion of that airport. This is a big subject, but one that (particularly from the perspective of an American who has also lived in Germany) uniquely positions Portugal and a place like the Tagus Estuary at this perilous intersection between now disastrously ascendant neoliberal and rightwing forces and the possibility of a very dystopian future overlapping with attributes of an already dystopian present—overlapping furthermore with a still-rich local history and presence, one that can still be defended from cynicism and material (financial) threat both internally and externally.

I mention all of this (unfortunately only as generalizations here) because this internal/external perspective very much informed my approach to this project and the so-called voice of the flamingo. It was my first exposure to the Ebro Delta, so this was a really wonderful discovery for me— again, another region and biome of fully overlapping human and non-human systems informing and interdependent with each other. The bird life there is extraordinary, and extraordinarily accessible, as is the human social, industrial, and agricultural presence. The delta is such a wildly dynamic zone exactly situated between the inland and the vast and unceasing body of the sea. It was a gift to get to know it briefly—and in fact was for me, and I think Nuno Cera and Julia Albani as well, one of the dramaturgical, cinematic, and poetic theses of this project: to really place ourselves directly in the environment, not as scientists or political ethicists, but as animals ourselves. Tourists of sorts, yes. But this is the point. Where do we overlap, as poetic data, with all of these other presences—as the delta, the estuary, the river, the sea, the eye of the bird, the lens of the camera, the black eye of the text are all such lenses.

I live just north of the Tagus Estuary, at the sea, and you can feel this all the time—every minute: that we are the fragile intersection of these forces, as are the non-human forces themselves, both sentient and otherwise. A kind of total sentient algorithm of seeing. This is also the radical temporal perspective of the flamingo and its co-conspirators (the cyanobacteria, the Artemia or brine shrimp, the sea salt structures themselves…).

It is this matrix that is the voice of the Acid Flamingo. The question for me is not so much how the non-human voice of the flamingo is created, but: how am I already non-human? And what is that voice?

JW: This imminent risk of change is true, and is certainly true of the Ebro Delta, which is likewise subject to radical changes of both human and inhuman cause. I would say that the generation of that non-human voice rather is the artistic practice, or at least mine: an encounter with that entity. And a perpetual sensitivity to it. It’s around us all the time. We are it, ourselves. With The Glacier, that entity, and the voice of it, was specifically the radical transition into a suburban architecture, and the total real estate of it as a geologic event: the architectural shape of the Anthropocene. Adjacent to that, or rather at its center, narratively, is the voicing of Trinity, or the atomic bomb, at the very core of the engine of the American cultural economy—literally.

Now—and with the Acid Flamingo—that non-human entity is omnipresent, and of such algorithmic (autonomic) force as to be nearly omnipotent as a human/inhuman animation, the performance of para-human sentience as a lifelikeness. This is precisely where I and the flamingo overlap, as what Timothy Morton might phase overlapping hyper-objects: us encountering each other as dimensions of each other. Our overlapping time scales, our shared ecosystems, and in this case, literally, the very existence of an oxygen-rich planetary climate, the color pink, our overlapping symbolic fields… This is why I say that the voicing of the non-human entity is not really the subject or objective of the artistic practice, but rather is the artistic practice itself. The artwork itself literally is that non-human voice. That non-human sentience.

JW I’ve mentioned the primary position of the flamingo on our overlapping symbolic fields. Nuno and Julia encountered it on some previous trips to the Ebro Delta and really just fell in love with the flamingo, and developed a great deal of affection and empathy for it. They’re very strange and unique and impressive creatures—and yet so familiar to us. They just shimmer with character that is so simultaneously alien and familiar. All birds have this quality to some extent. I once described birds as a conflation of insects and kittens… But the flamingos are particularly expressive of these qualities. They are so like and unlike us: they do not migrate in regular, seasonal migration routes and patterns, but they travel extensively to locations that they have established as being optimal. They mate in pairs but also reside in colonies that share and outsource child-care and differentiate between children and teenagers… But they are also almost literally dinosaurs, with one of the oldest dating bird morphologies on Earth; and they are specifically engineered and adapted to live in some of the harshest, most lethally saline habitats on Earth.

But it gets crazier. Their pink color is derived from their consumption of carotenoids found in cyanobacteria and consequently Artemia (brine shrimp). This very same cyanobacteria were responsible for the global “oxygen revolution” which has made all life on earth as we know it possible. The flamingos are time travelers. And in that moment of encounter, with both information and with the flamingo itself—I am also a time traveler.

The flamingo is non-human but is also so deeply present in our own symbolic field. What does the “flamingo” represent to us, say, in pop or commercial culture? Leisure, vacation, pleasure, ideal climate, paradise… Paradise. The flamingo is an actual representation of this paradise of an oxygen-rich Earth, in our color-field, at a cosmically temporal scale. The flamingo is cosmic, just as we are.

The flamingo itself is a kind of epiphany. Confronted with this, there’s no need to generate empathy for this voice. It just happens. Like being an astronaut in space and having that empathy-generating view of the planet. And we all have that capability now, via the internet. We are taking that opportunity, but power is yet not.

And this encounter is the voice of the Acid Flamingo. Not something other than a poetic transcription of this poetic encounter. Me—as us—as the flamingo, as each other.

JW: The primary research is finding a way to place myself in an overlapping poetic coordinate with the flamingo itself, and all that I’ve described. This is a drawing on my own experience, and specifically my own experience with contemporary human phenomena, including, primarily, language. As an artistic process, in some ways this might be described as a shamanic process. This is not to invoke some appropriated or new-age terminology—certainly not toward a commodified (and bogus) healing process—but as a process of orientation in which symbolic fields overlapping between human and non-human entities are encountered and channeled into a kind of distilled symbolic iconography, as art-making. A performance of experience, meditation, text, video, sound, and spectacle as an experience that is simultaneously disorienting and orienting. Obviously, a lot more can be said about this—but the primary research is this practice. A poetic (and cinematic) practice.

The secondary research is how to access the coordinate of the flamingo that overlaps with our own temporal coordinate (airport, real estate, internet, rice, salt, museum, zoo, science-fiction, iconography, whatever it may be…). For this, I learned as much about the flamingo and its environment as I could in the time of development that we had. I read, and we spoke with field biologists in both the Lisbon estuary and at the Ebro Delta. Nuno Cera and Julia Albani also conducted interviews with some of these scientists which were then provided to me in translation.

For example—to put it more concretely, regarding both primary and secondary research or processes: one of the dimensions or entry points that I was most interested in with regard to the generation of a “character” or voice (of the Flamingo) is the very problem of this voicing at its outset: the tension between the individual and the collective, or the mass; and whether there is such a distinction at all. It’s a problem that we now face ourselves, both in how we encounter ourselves and non-human others. What if we’re actually all the same person? And if so, how am I also individual. This is paramount to our own contemporary predicament, and in seeing and representing something (or someone) like a flamingo.

How is it possible that I am both an individual (human) and the mass of humans, inside each other? I am at once individual and mass humanity. This is not speculative—this is something that we are now able to encounter and experience daily as the streaming mirror of the internet, as the real estate of ourselves, as the globalization of ourselves. I am also the process of everyone else, indistinguishable from them. This is horrifically alien, and intolerable, and it is also a point of empathy, of epiphany, and of reason.

When I am speaking, and particularly with regard to trans-individual contemporary issues, am I speaking as a human, or as human? And is this voice verifiable, or is it some kind of science-fiction? This is the same lens through which we view wild (or inhuman) creatures. What is the difference between a flamingo and flamingo? And how do we make that determination? In the case of the Acid Flamingo it is both the individual flamingo and simultaneously all flamingos ever who are speaking. The voice of a flamingo, and of total flamingo. The tension is not unresolved, but sustained—as an impossible voice.

This is the encounter we face of ourselves now… Or at least what I find to be revelatory: the Acid Flamingo is the voice of us speaking as each other, both collectively and individually, as that tension—as something like a tiny cosmic transmission, in pink neon, winding through black space, between the estuary, its deep past, and its future airport.

We think that we are not wild and feral and savage and alien. We are. We think that we are not also non-human. But we are.

So this voice is also Lynchian, Tarkovskian.... The voice of the poetic Other, strobing between the human and the inhuman. We live in a post-Lynchian world now, in which the Acid Flamingo is a voice in defense of the sincere abstract, in opposition to the content of fraudulent reproduction.

As the Acid Flamingo says:

I want to speak about other things, but there is no other thing.